I was watching an Australian political review program this evening and as I was watching I realised something much more profoundly than I ever had before. When people actively try to hide their business from others we don’t trust them. When governments say they have policy initiative but then do not show them, we don’t trust them. When military say that they are doing things by the book then don’t show their video of their work, we don’t trust them. When corporations use their considerable funds to silence critics, we don’t trust them.
In youth work I have heard a number of my colleagues over the years say that they could not speak about the type of work they do because of confidentiality issues. Let me just say BOLLOCKS!!! I have heard of organisations who actively seek to limit their public accountability. Currently there are a number of inquiries in Australia into lack of transparency of organisations and in a number of these organisations youth workers have key roles.
To save the reputation of our profession and it workers we need more transparency. In our individual work and in our organisations we must come to the understanding that if we want to have complete respect of our work people need to understand what we do.
Be transparent in all you do. It will get on peoples goat… But it will help you to have a successful career.
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
One of my best mates in youth work said to me today that he had been speaking to a bunch of people about the work of Ultimate Youth Worker recently. He stated that he was surprised when almost all of them stated that they didn’t think there was an issue with self care within the sector. When my friend spoke of burnout rates and levels of psychological stress in our sector they could begin to see the issue.
If managers and organisations really understood the negative effects and the cost to the organisation then self care would be the first thing on their agenda rather than the last. If organisations saw the revolving door that spat out their staff you think they would try to stop it. We can no longer ignore the fact that our sector is allowing staff to become psychologically damaged just to meet KPI’s.
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
I was recently speaking to an organisation who were going to fire a youth worker. They had a list of grievances a mile long from inappropriate behaviour towards colleagues to inability to take constructive criticism. When I spoke to them about the behaviours it became clear that the behaviours were coming from an overly zealous youth work employee.
The employee had seen a number of issues in their place of employment and wanted them all fixed at once. He saw traumatic events being forgotten by other staff in their day to day work with highly traumatised young people. He pushed to forcefully for management to change procedures. He flaunted his knowledge in the faces of more experienced practitioners.
Sometimes when we see injustices, particularly if we are new to the sector, we forget that our passion can come across as arrogance. We get colleagues and service providers off side by our actions our effectiveness takes a massive hit. Most changes to entire sectors do not happen from the little guy in the field but by managers and policy makers at the top of the pile.
Passion is good, for the most part. It reminds us why we got into the work we do. Passion needs to be tempered by common sense. Otherwise we burn our bridges before they even get built.
Leave us a comment below or post a comment on facebook and twitter.
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
Today I was reflecting on my career and the major traumatic events that I have seen. I was speaking to a class of school chaplains looking at trauma and abuse. As I was reflecting it dawned on me how many truly traumatised people I have come across. On average two suicides a year, more sexually abused young people than I care to recall, many drug and alcohol abusers and self harmers to name a few.
When I got home I started to think of the many times I have struggled with the traumas of others. This vicarious trauma has almost taken me out of action on a number of occasions, mostly because of a lack of training and supervision. The biggest issue however, is that I care. When a traumatic event happens I actually give a crap. And this is the problem with our profession. Those who give a crap will always be at the mercy of vicarious trauma if they are not supervised and supported.
Today my class of chaplains looked at what trauma is, how it affects people and how to support people through trauma. What was lacking in the training was how as workers we deal with the vicarious trauma when it affects us. As a sector we need to develop a philosophy of self care that starts in the training rooms and lecture halls and follows us through to the end of our careers.
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
Recently in my state many of the youth mentoring programs have had to come to terms with losing their funding. This has led to a number of programs closing up shop and leaving many young people in the lurch. The big issue is that these programs provide much more benefit than they cost.
The sad fact is youth workers can’t do everything that our young people need. We need others to help! The best way I know of is to have a mentoring program. In my career I have been involved in a number of mentoring programs and they were all worth their weight in gold.
As youth workers we need to keep youth mentoring programs going… even if we don’t have the funds. We must provide opportunities to develop our young people and one of the best opportunities is to build their network. To have older people guide them through the storms and stress. To have people with similar interests build their knowledge.
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
Over the past weekend I spent some time reading about the professionalisation debate which has swept the global youth work fraternity. I read that as an industry it is required of us to become more professionalised in order to cement our place in the human services sector. I read that we must become more stringent on who we let in and what we do to those who do not conform to the new ways. I read that we need associations to manage our professionalism in the same vain as nurses, psychologists and lawyers. I read and I wept.
There are few in the youth services industry which would not argue that we need to become more professional. There are even fewer who would argue that we don’t need more stringent requirements on those we allow into the sector. The issue that we see in the current professionalization argument is that we are forsaking youth work to be seen as equal to every other generic profession.
Youth work needs to stand up and be counted. There is little good in us becoming like every other cookie cutter profession. In doing so we will suffer the death of a thousand cuts. Every time we give up a little of our innovation or uniqueness to become more like other professions we die a little. When we become more like everyone else we lose something of ourselves.
Recently I was speaking with a youth work student who believed whole heartedly that the only way to do youth work was case management. She believed that the way she had been taught to do youth work over her studies was leading her into a case management role. This limited view came to bear as her lecturers sought to instil that case management was the highest form of professional youth work.
We are at the crossroads, and as I was told as a child we need to look both ways before moving forward. So far, most of the literature has not asked what the down side of professionalism might be… and this is the question that we most need to discuss. Because after all the fate of our sector rests on the decisions we make today.
You can also leave us a comment below or post a comment on facebook and twitter.
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
A number of years ago I was speaking to some colleagues about our concern that youth work as a profession was losing its ability to innovate and adapt to changing tides of funding and the needs of our clients. We spent a number of hours pulling apart the issues we saw and developing a thesis for change. We realised somewhere in the midst of our conversation that it was not good enough to simply point out the issues in the profession if we were not willing to do something about them.
Ghandi said that you must be the change you want to see in the world. We realised this quote so richly that evening. We realised that if we wanted a more professional sector we needed to be more professional. If we wanted a better trained workforce it had to begin with us. If we were to have a supportive and caring sector then we needed to care for ourselves and seek support. We realised that the first step in our journey was to be the change you want to see in the world.
We began Ultimate Youth Worker to be the change we wanted in the youth sector. What change do you want in the youth sector??? How will you be the change you wish to see???
You can also leave us a comment below or post a comment on facebook and twitter.
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
A little over twelve months ago I was part of a small group of youth workers at their wits end with how the youth sector was progressing. We were concerned about the current curriculum for youth workers. We were concerned about the lack of good ongoing professional development for the sector. We were really concerned that there was a lack of mentors and solid professional supervision in youth work organisations. In short we were worried that youth work was becoming a lazy profession.
We discussed these issues many times and eventually we challenged each other to do something about it. most of us on that fateful night decided to stop whinging and to do something about the issues we saw. Some of us became youth work teachers in university, TAFE and private registered training organisations. Some of us began internal change in our own organisations. Some of us embarked on the development of the Ultimate Youth Worker organisation.
As I have embarked on the journey that has been the Ultimate Youth Worker I have found that there are a number of thoughtful, concerned youth workers changing the world. We are all coming at the issues in the youth sector from slightly different perspectives and using different ways of communicating but we all want to see youth work become more professional, more caring of our young people and more supportive of staff.
There are a number of canny outlaws in the youth work sector at the moment who we have been supported by and who we have great respect for. We have been phenomenally supported by Shae and Stephen Pepper of www.youthworkinit.com in the USA, they have promoted our blog and allowed us the honour of posting on theirs. But in their own right they promote best practice through knowledge sharing and support the sector through resource development. We have also been supported by an awesome youth minister from South Africa in Neels Redelinghuys. Neels runs a youth ministry in Bloemfontein, South Africa and a great blog and twitter account and has promoted pretty much everything we have said for the last six months (we wonder if he isn’t angling for a job).
These are just a small group of thoughtful, concerned youth workers changing the world, and as once was said:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has. —Margaret Mead
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
This morning I got to have breakfast with one of my amazing mates. Over the healthiest option I could care to find (a double shot latte and a three stack of pancakes and maple syrup) we discussed the ins and outs of the youth sector. Particularly we spoke about the stress that comes with the job. We also spoke of the ability that some roles have to help youth workers burnout. anecdotally we believed that the average youth worker lasts two years and if you are in a role like resi-care you are lucky to last six months.
After we had chewed the fat for a while mainly bitching about how hardly done by we are as youth workers our attention turned to the organisations who employ us. There is a duty of care that organisations owe to their staff which we at Ultimate Youth Worker believe is being allowed to lapse. Many years ago unions fought for the eight hour work day. In my career I have never worked an eight hour day. Sleepover shifts circumvent OH&S legislation. Staff are exposed to vicarious trauma and poorly debriefed. Youth workers are forced to work within bureaucratic frameworks that require more work and less reflection.
The average youth worker drowns in bureaucracy and its worse if they don’t look after their self care
Many of the staff that we come across at Ultimate Youth Worker want to do their job to the best of their ability and they all say that they could use more support from their managers. Most managers we meet would love to support their staff but are drowning in paperwork and their own lack of support to be able to help anyone. Then when all hell breaks loose we crucify the staff and managers for not doing their job right. If there is not time to reflect and maintain self care what do we expect!!!
Organisations that value their staff develop them as much as they develop their young people. Managers carve out time for professional development, supervision and the overall welfare of their staff. Organisations actively develop policy and procedures to support their staff to do their job effectively and without to much vicarious trauma. Organisations REQUIRE professional development of their staff and demand that their managers support their staff as whole people not just staff.
We don’t get paid enough to do the job and get treated like crap. Organisations need to take responsibility for their staff wellbeing, for sustainability of the sector and for their own reputation. Funding bodies are not immune from their responsibility either!
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
For a long time now there has been a conversation going on in youth work. A professional/ para-professional dichotomy which many believe is subversive to the current push for professionalization. A conversation which preaches resistance to the neo-liberal free market push which seeks qualification over experience and cheap labour over appropriate supports.
The issue with requiring professionalism of a vocation is one which is being faced by social work in Australia and has been faced by psychologists. One of the issues which has and will continue to rear its head is if youth workers professionalise they will require higher pay. Higher pay in a free market means less workers. Less workers mean less appropriate service provision. Another issue is that of training and qualification. With over 75% of the current youth work employ holding a two year diploma or less where do we set the bar. The youth workers association in Victoria requires a bachelor degree for full membership. The Department of Human Services however only requires a Certificate IV for its youth work staff.
At Ultimate Youth Worker we believe that the professionalisation debate is currently doing more harm than good to youth work. In the storm and stress that is youth work we need all the boots on the ground that we can possibly muster. At Ultimate Youth Worker we see the current debate thinning out the herd. It makes qualifications the epitome of the profession and damns anyone else. Youth work throughout history has bucked the trends and required youth workers to think outside the square. The current push for professionalization places us firmly in the square.
Any dead fish can float with the current, It takes a live one to swim against it. We need a new paradigm to the idea of current professionalization ideology. We need well trained, well supported qualified youth workers! What we don’t need is a broad swathe approach to attaining this. We need a whole lot more practical wisdom in youth work. We need a whole lot more passion. We need a whole lot more accountability. What we do not need more of is control in the form of restricting sector size. We need to set ourselves apart from the pack.
What do you think? Leave us a comment below or post a comment on facebook and twitter.
Aaron Garth is a Melbourne-based youth worker, social worker, and mental health practitioner with over two decades of experience supporting young people across Australia. As Executive Director of Ultimate Youth Worker, he leads a team dedicated to training, coaching, and developing professionals in the youth sector.
A graduate of RMIT University and current PhD candidate, Aaron has worked across some of the most challenging areas of youth services — from homelessness and mental health to drug and alcohol outreach and residential care. He is a sought-after speaker, educator, and advocate for a more professionalised youth workforce, and has taught at institutions including RMIT, Chisholm Institute, and Eastern College Australia.
Aaron's work is driven by a simple belief: when youth workers are better supported, young people get better outcomes.
